- Mars Colonization
- Long has been a dream in science fiction
- Elon Musk wants to make it possible
- Early stories imagined worlds like our own
- Reality is much harsher
- Venus - it’s earth’s twin, a bit smaller and a little closer to the sun. No a jungle planet but an inferno
- Mars - a good deal farther away - an astronomer thought he saw canals on Mars. The reality is much different
- The environment
- The atmosphere is very sparse at .088 PSI vs 14.7 PSI for earth. Similar to 35Km
- The atmosphere is mostly made of CO2 - there is nothing to breath
- Because it is far away from the sun and doesn’t have enough atmosphere to hold a lot of heat making it very cold
- It is either too cold or too low pressure for liquid water
- There are major dust storms which can cover the whole planet
- It has no magnetosphere to protect it from solar radiation
- Gravity is 1/3 what it is on earth, or about double the Moon’s
- It’s dustier than anything most of us have experienced
- The day is pretty close to an Earth day - 25 hours
- Habitat
- Life would be very different
- Humans would need to be in sealed places with enough oxygen
- We could probably produce oxygen by growing plans or algae within the enclosed environment
- A perfect seal isn’t required, we can always keep pressure by pumping in outside air so long as plants can produce oxygen fast enough
- We can expect to be underground or in caves
- If local materials can be sourced, the settlement could grow quite large
- Economy
- Mars would need a tremendous economy to sustain itself.
- In addition to needing to grow food, it would need to support oxygen production, water reclamation and location and other regular services
- It is hard to imagine it self-sustaining until there are many millions there
- This means it must import many many things - what can it export in return? Valuable minerals?
- Communication
- How fast can a connection between Mars and earth be?
- Latency is always going to be very high - 20 minutes is normal
- Throughput - 1 GBps is probably achievable, maybe more
- The sun will get in the way
- The sun blocks radio waves because it acts metallic, emits its own and it is huge
- The only options are to “go dark” or to go around the sun
- Going around could involve a relay satellite around another planet but that will occasionally be occluded as well
- Lagrange points are probably our best bet because a Lagrange point won’t be occluded at the same time the planet is
- What goes over that link?
- Most regular communication on Mars could stay local to any colonies and fiber-optic links could be constructed between colonies
- There is also a constellation of satellites that could help but we needn’t be limited to that
- Forget video calls, phone calls and streaming - nothing real-time makes sense
- Major movies and TV shows would probably be transferred regularly and stored locally
- Likewise, software would likely be synchronized
- Even a 1Gbps capacity link would be enough for millions of people to send e-mails that are text-only, though there would likely be a cost for using such a service to ensure usage stays in check
- Photos and videos would also be possible over this link but the cost would be high so people would look for very high compression rates and lower resolutions.
- How fast can a connection between Mars and earth be?
- Culture
- What would happen to culture?
- People would, by necessity, be indoors all the time. The culture would therefor be quite urban in some sense
- Certainly, the population wouldn’t be entirely disconnected from Earth
- Values and needs would shift over time
- Culture would then start to shift - local governments reflect the local culture
- Earth governments would be limited in their ability to respond to anything that happens because there is a gap of at least three months to travel between the planets.
- Would independence be possible?
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We explore what it would take to make a Mars colony, what challenges it would face and what it might be like